Legal Issues Relevant To File Sharing
The challenges facing copyright holders in the face of file sharing systems are quite novel historically and have highlighted many new challenges in both theory and practice:
- Ambiguities in the interpretation of copyright law
- The new challenges posed by international communications and varying legislations
- Mass litigation and the development of processes for evidence and discovery
- Rapidly developing new technologies and uses, including file hosting sites
- Low barriers to entry by would-be sharers and the development of a mass usage of the technologies
- File sharing approaches developed in response to litigation against sharers, which obfuscate or hide the fact that sharing is happening, or the identities of those involved. For example: encryption and Darknets.
New copyright laws and infrastructure has been created to provide the internet technology, which promotes creativity and the sharing of information, with the ability to file share legally and on your own terms. As creators and members of the social online community, we now have the right to distribute our work as we see fit. The notion of "All Rights Reserved" does not fit properly with the nature of the internet and with the culture that is constantly evolving as a result of its capabilities. Even things like Wikipedia, which in its nature does not fit the mold of traditional copyright laws, uses new licenses to publish, edit, and share information to anyone. The legal components that were in place when file sharing first started to create legal problems, for example the Napster lawsuit, have been reworked to allow online sharing to be done legally.
File hosting services may be used as a means to distribute or share files without consent of the copyright owner. In such cases one individual uploads a file to a file hosting service, which others can then download. Legal assessments can be very diverse.
For example in the case of Swiss-German file hosting service RapidShare, in 2010 the US government's congressional international anti-piracy caucus declared the site a "notorious illegal site", claiming that the site was "overwhelmingly used for the global exchange of illegal movies, music and other copyrighted works". But in the legal case Atari Europe S.A.S.U. v. Rapidshare AG in Germany,<''''Bold text''''Bold text''''Bold text''''Bold text''''''''''ref name="atari v rapidshare">Legal case: OLG Dusseldorf, Judgement of 22 March 2010, Az I-20 U 166/09 dated 22 March 2010. the Düsseldorf higher regional court examined claims related to alleged infringing activity and reached the conclusion on appeal that "most people utilize RapidShare for legal use cases" and that to assume otherwise was equivalent to inviting "a general suspicion against shared hosting services and their users which is not justified". The court also observed that the site removes copyrighted material when asked, does not provide search facilities for illegal material, noted previous cases siding with RapidShare, and after analysis the court concluded that the plaintiff's proposals for more strictly preventing sharing of copyrighted material – submitted as examples of anti-file sharing measures RapidShare might have adopted – were found to be "unreasonable or pointless".
By contrast in January 2012 the United States Department of Justice seized and shut down the file hosting site Megaupload.com and commenced criminal cases against its owners and others. Their indictment concluded that Megaupload differed from other online file storage businesses, suggesting a number of design features of its operating model as being evidence showing a criminal intent and venture. Examples cited included reliance upon advertising revenue and other activities showing the business was funded by (and heavily promoted) downloads and not storage, defendants' communications helping users who sought infringing material, and defendants' communications discussing their own evasion and infringement issues. As of 2012 the case has not yet been heard.
Read more about this topic: Legal Aspects Of File Sharing
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